Henry Clay Frick II, 87, Physician And President of Frick Collection

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: February 15, 2007

Henry Clay Frick II, a physician, professor of medicine and former president of the board of the Frick Collection, the art museum in his family's stately former home on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, died on Friday at his home in Alpine, N.J. He was 87.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Adelaide Trafton.

Dr. Frick was the grandson of Henry Clay Frick, the coal mine owner and partner of the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie; in 1892 the elder Frick became chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, which was later consolidated into the United States Steel Corporation.

An obstetrician and oncologist, Dr. Frick was a professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a staff member at what was then Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, from 1955 until his retirement in 1985.

Dr. Frick was the president of the Frick Collection from 1965 to 2001 and had been a trustee since 1953. He was the last surviving member of the family to have lived in the 1914 Beaux-Arts mansion, on Fifth Avenue from 70th to 71st Street.

Most of the museum's collection was donated by Dr. Frick's grandfather. In the 1970s Dr. Frick oversaw the installation of an elevated garden along 70th Street, designed by the noted landscape architect Russell Page, with a gallery below the garden for exhibitions on loan from other museums.

Dr. Frick was born on Oct. 18, 1919, in Roslyn, N.Y., the son of Frances Dixon Frick and Childs Frick. Dr. Frick graduated from Princeton in 1942 and received his medical degree from Columbia in 1945. He served as an Army doctor in Germany after World War II.

In 1945 Dr. Frick married Jane Allison Coates. They were divorced in 1980, and she died in 1995. Besides his daughter Adelaide, of Topsham, Me., Dr. Frick is survived by his second wife, Emily Troth duPont Frick; a son, Henry Frick III, of Port Alexander, Alaska; two other daughters, Elise, of Manhattan, and Frances Frick, a Serbian Orthodox nun now known as Sister Paula; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.